The Effortless Experience™

The Key to Customer Loyalty

Don’t Exceed ExpectationsMake It Easy

When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers by helping them solve their problems. However, customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty.

Many companies try to drive customer loyalty by delighting them—exceeding customer expectations with above-and-beyond service. Yet this strategy is difficult and costly to deliver; worse, it fails to deliver a proportionate increase in loyalty.

5 Reasons ConsumersDislike Customer Service

Consumers don't like talking to customer service representatives—they prefer to find solutions to their problem themselves. Here are the top five reasons consumers don't want to talk to your customer service team.

Is Your Customer Service Hurting Your Brand?

The Effortless ExperienceTM

The New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

Instead of struggling to delight customers, companies should create low-effort service experiences that help their customers solve problems quickly and easily. Our research shows this is the most successful way to build customer loyalty.

Customer effort is an excellent indicator of customer intent to repurchase and increase spend.

To reduce customer effort, leading organizations reframe service strategies by:

What's brilliant is the observation that we can easily make things worse for customers. Here is implementable guidance to avoid those pitfalls.

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Richard JoyceOperations Director Home Retail Group Customer Services

What Is Customer Effort?

Customer effort is not just about what a customer has to do, but also he or she feels about an interaction. In fact, 65% of effort comes from how the service rep made the customer feel. Companies must focus on hiring, developing, and reinforcing low-effort skills of service reps so they can actively guide customers and preempt their needs during service interactions. By assessing and measuring customer effort, companies can maintain low-effort service delivery.

The Low-Effort Path

CEB helps customer service organizations drive customer loyalty by supporting their adoption of the low-effort path. See how this proven method improves your customer service experiences while reducing disloyalty and lowering costs.

How to Hire Controller Customer Service Reps

Our research shows there is one frontline rep profile that is most effective at delivering low-effort customer service experiences. This profile is known as “The Controller.” Use this interview guide to identify Controllers among your job candidates.

By using data from the Effortless Experience™ Dashboard, LoyaltyOne was able to identify the best opportunities to decrease customer effort and costs by more effectively guiding customers to self-service channels.

By partnering with CEB through two days of live training and eight weeks of virtual reinforcement, Anthem supervisors significantly improved coaching effectiveness while decreasing the amount of time spent coaching.

The best way to understand if a company is providing good customer service is how easy it is for customers to get what they came for; internally at CEB, we call this the "PITAF" (pain in the a** factor).